


Rough Landing

by Skarabrae_stone



Series: And the Fall to Doom a Long Way Away [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 20:18:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skarabrae_stone/pseuds/Skarabrae_stone
Summary: Three days after Becky Barnes fell to her death, Steve boards the Valkyrie. He couldn’t save Becky, but maybe he can save New York. The bigger question is, will he save himself?Prequel to "And the Fall to Doom a Long Way Away".





	Rough Landing

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: suicidal thoughts, minor flashbacks to the September 11th terrorist attacks, near-drowning.  
> Details in end notes.

 

They’re going to take out New York for real, this time, and he can’t, he won’t, he _can’t_ let it happen again.

He’s running faster than he’s ever run before, like all the bullies of Sutter Avenue are after him, his feet pounding on the tarmac and his breath bursting in his lungs, and all he can think is, _not again, not again, not again._

It’s selfish, maybe, to take this so personally—to feel this level of panic, of protectiveness, for reasons that are only partly to do with the lives of eight million people hanging in the balance. But there it is: it feels like HYDRA did this on purpose, to spite him: they’ve taken Becky from him, and now they’re taking New York.

It’s not a coherent thought, not even close—more like a buzzing, guilty terror at the base of his skull, urging him on. He acts on instinct, his legs moving as fast as he can push them, his mind screaming: _Nononononononono_

The plane pulls away from him, gradually but steadily: even in his enhanced form, he can’t hope to keep up. He’s not going to catch it, but damn if he’s going to stop trying—he tries to push harder, to match the plane’s speed through sheer fucking willpower.

_Nononononononono_

A horn beeps, and he glances behind him: there’s a jeep bearing down on him, with Fury at the wheel and Peggy in the seat next to him. Her lips form words, shouting something, but he can’t hear anything over the roar of engines and the pounding of his own feet, his own heart.

The jeep pulls even with him, and he jumps, landing in the back seat and immediately scrambling to the front.

“I’ve got to get on that plane!” he shouts, and Fury shouts back, “Why do you think we’re out here, Rogers?!”

They’re gaining again; the jeep’s engine is making a whining noise, pushed to its limits like Steve, but its capabilities are higher. They’re gaining.

He adjusts himself, preparing, calculating what he’ll need to do to make the leap; his breath is coming in short gasps, but he’s powered through worse.

“Steve,” says Peggy, and he turns to look at her—her curls are blowing everywhere in the wind, and her eyes are big and scared, but her mouth is stubborn. She looks at him for a moment that feels far longer than it actually is, searchingly. Whatever she’s looking for, he doesn’t think she finds it, because her mouth twists a little and she grabs his hand.

“Be careful,” she says.

Steve almost laughs; he’s never felt less like being careful in his life, and that’s saying something. He tries to think of something to tell her, anything, but all the words he might have said have been whisked away, out of reach like Becky, like the goddamned plane.

“Nearly there,” says Fury.

He nods, climbing onto the dashboard, crouching there. The plane’s front wheels leave the ground, but the jeep is closing in on it—there’s still time, he can still make the jump.

“Steve!” Peggy says again, but he can’t think of anything to say, any way to reassure her.

Fury drives them right under the belly of the plane, and Steve stands on the hood, and makes the jump, grabbing onto the metal lip of the open hatchway.

It’s a blur after that—there are people to fight, there always are, and in the back of his mind Steve can see the way the towers crumpled on the TV screen, hear the screams and the sirens and the guys in the frame shop swearing as they tried to take in the magnitude of what had just happened. He can smell the burning fuel, acrid and thick, and the dust that lay over the city for days, weeks, months afterward.

He breaks a guy’s neck, and takes down another with a knife, and at some point he realizes that the screaming in his mind has become verbal, a string of negatives:

“No, no, no, no, _no_ , you bastards, not again, _no!_ ”

The last operative goes down, and he stands in the bay of the plane, breathing hard, trying to get his bearings. The plane is still on course. He’s got to get to the cockpit.

Schmidt’s waiting for him there, because of course he is, the goddamned son of a bitch—German name, but the guy’s an American, or used to be. He’s got the Tesseract, and says a lot of stuff that Steve doesn’t process in the least, too busy trying to figure out how to kill the guy and disarm the missiles.

Schmidt has one of the electric guns they’d used on Becky; Steve’s not quick enough to avoid it, the first time, and the agony of it is unbelievable—enough to white out his vision, to make him drop to the floor. Steve has a lot of experience with pain, though, and he rolls as he goes down, putting the Tesseract between him and Schmidt.

It’s enough—the pain stops, and he manages to get up again, warier this time, and gets close enough to fight hand-to-hand. Time blurs again, and then Schmid is jeering at him, yelling something, and then he touches the Tesseract and everything turns blue.

Steve is left staring at a hole in the floor of the plane and not much else to indicate that Schmidt was ever there; he thinks that he should feel satisfaction, or maybe righteous anger, but all he can feel is tired.

“Steve,” says Peggy’s voice in his earpiece, “Come in, Steve—what’s your status?”

“Schmidt’s dead,” he says shortly. “The Tesseract melted him.”

There’s a second of silence, but only that: Peggy’s always been good at assessing a situation quickly. “The missiles?”

“I haven’t checked yet.”

He goes to the bank of instruments in the cockpit, trying to make sense of the blinking lights and computer readouts. When he finally gets his bearings, he feels like his rib-cage has suddenly collapsed.

“Uh oh.”

“What? What’s going on?”

He looks at the computer screen again, just to make sure he’s reading it correctly. “The missiles deploy automatically when they’re in range.”

Peggy’s voice over the com is strained. “How long before they’re in range?”

Steve takes a breath. “Five minutes, twenty-three seconds.”

In his memory, the sirens are screaming louder than ever, the smoke stinging his nostrils. Becky was out making deliveries when it happened, one of the three jobs she was working then, and he didn’t know where she was, had no way of finding out. She’d called him from a payphone, finally, her voice tinny over the bad connection.

_“Steve, thank God. Are you okay?”_

_“Yeah, yeah, I’m—what about you, where are you?”_

_“Yeah, I’m in Upper Manhattan. But they’ve closed the bridges—I don’t know if I can get home tonight.”_

Peggy’s talking with someone else; he can hear a voice, Fury probably, in the background. “Can you deprogram it?” she says.

He shakes his head, forgetting she can’t see it. Everything feels very far away, as though he’s suspended in time, in space. He’s gone numb, somehow, and nothing exists except the promise he’s made: _I won’t let it happen. Not again._

“I don’t have any of the access codes,” he tells her. “And if I make a mistake, there’s a good chance they’ll deploy anyway.”

“Then—”

“I’ve got to crash the plane.” He says it calmly, surely; as if somehow, some part of him had known it would come to this, all along.

“What?”

“If I crash it into the ocean—it won’t be in range, it can’t launch the missiles.”

“Steve, no—”

“I’ve got three minutes, Peggy,” he says gently. “If you’ve got a better idea, tell me now.”

He times her silence by the countdown readout—five seconds before she says. “Okay. Okay, Steve.”

“Tell me how to switch it to manual,” he says, and she does, and then tells him how to make the dive, because Peggy knows things like this—how to fly a plane, how to hack a computer, how to disassemble a bomb. She would, he thinks, be much better in this situation than he is, but without serum-enhanced muscles there’s no way she could have gotten onto the plane in the first place.

“Okay,” he says, watching the nose of the plane dip. “I’ve got it.” He glances at the readouts. “Impact in one minute, seventeen seconds.”

“Alright,” she says. “Good job. Now get out of there.”

“Peggy—”

“What?”

He swallows. “I have to steer it,” he tells her. “We’re both going down.”

“No.” Her voice goes high-pitched, panicked. “No—Steve, no!”

“There’s no other way.”

In a way, he’s glad of it, too; he doesn’t know how much longer he can stand to be around, anyway, with Becky’s absence sucking at him like a giant black hole in the center of his chest. He feels like he’s been cut loose, and there’s a certain sort of peace creeping over him.

If there’s an afterlife, he’ll see her again. If not, it won’t matter.

“Steve, listen to me. If you cut the engine, it’ll crash anyway, and you can parachute out—”

The ocean looks so blue, dead ahead of him with the sun shining on it.

 _Will it hurt_? he wonders, and hopes it will be quick. It’s cowardly, maybe, but at the moment he doesn’t feel he can stand any more pain. Then again, he won’t have to stand it for very long…

“Steve! Cut the engines and eject!”

“It’s too late, Pegs,” he says tiredly. “It’s okay.”

“Steve,” she says, and the panic is gone, replaced with anger, the steely voice he knows so well, though it’s only rarely been directed at him. “If you don’t eject _right now_ , I am going to kick your arse into next Sunday if I have to go to the gates of hell to do it!”

The water is much closer, now, the meters falling away. His eyes and cheeks are wet, and he thinks of Becky, of her hand reaching out, of his fingers closing on thin air…

“We need you, Steve,” says Peg; he can tell she’s close to tears. “ _I_ need you—I can’t—I can’t do this on my own, not— _please_ , Steve.”

Impact in twenty seconds, and he can hear Becky’s voice, long ago, telling him, _“If something happens to me, Stevie, promise me you’ll look after them, alright?_ ”

It’s not just Peggy, he realizes. It’s Becky’s sisters, too, and the Commandoes—he can’t skip out on them. Becky wouldn’t want it.

 _You’ve always been such a drama king,_ she says in his head.

He cuts the engines, makes his way to the door and opens it. The wind tugs at him, and Peggy’s still talking in his ear.

“Steve? Please, Steve, just say something.”

“I’m here,” he says, hardly recognizing his own voice. “I’m jumping.”

And he does. No parachute; he doesn’t need one, or doesn’t care about the results either way. The plane goes screaming over his head, and the air goes rushing past him, and the smack as he hits the water hurts enough that he knows it would have broken his legs if he were a normal person. But he isn’t a normal person, and he plunges down, down, the saltwater stinging his eyes and nose, until the light is just a distant hint of green above him.

It would be easy, almost, to just let his weight carry him further, to exhale the air from his lungs and let the water come pouring in. He doesn’t, though—he swims upwards, and gets his head above the surface only to be immediately swamped by a huge wave.

He comes up again, spluttering and retching, eyes and nose and mouth burning with the salt. This time, he’s ready, and manages to take a breath and close his eyes before the next wave. He manages to get on top of the third wave, and sees a plume of steam in the distance, where the plane must have gone down.

The waves, he realizes, are from the plane, and sure enough, they get smaller after a minute or so. The com is gone, ripped away by the water; there’s no sign of land, no way to judge his position. He’s completely alone.

He treads water for a while, mechanically, watching the way the blue horizon of the ocean fades into the blue of the sky. When he gets tired, he floats on his back, closing his eyes against the brightness of the sun. He can feel it burning his face, the wind soughing over his body with a cold chill. The waves toss him around, sometimes washing over his face, getting into his eyes and nose and mouth despite his best efforts. He feels the salt like a second layer of skin, grimy and stiff.

The waves burble in his ears, sounding almost like voices. Steve thinks of mermaids, and then of krakens, and then of Becky, who’d had an obsession with all things mythological back in middle school.

 _“Hey, look at this one, Steve. Jenny Green-Teeth. She_ drowns _people!”_

_“I thought that was those other things—the horse things.”_

_“Kelpies. They drown people, too.”_

_“I think they just got tired of making up new stuff for their monster to do.”_

_“So? Look at her teeth. She’s_ sick _!”_

 

He floats until he starts to get cold, and then goes back to treading water. The steam from the plane is gone, and he wonders how much time it’s been, whether he’s drifted. There could be currents here, and he wouldn’t know.

The sun has shifted a little, he thinks, but he doesn’t remember where it was when he crashed the plane—left or right or behind—and so he can’t tell whether he’s moved position, or whether a lot of time has passed, or whether he’s just misremembering.

He tries to think of songs to occupy his head, but all of them remind him of Becky, and he doesn’t have the energy to grieve just now.

A jet flies overhead, leaving a white trail behind it.

How strange, that normal life is going on apace, as though HYDRA had never done anything, as though there’d never been any danger in the first place. Billions of people, going about their lives, never realizing how close they had come…

Steve should probably feel happy about that, relieved, but he can’t seem to manage to feel anything at all. All the rage, all the fear, that’s been fueling him for the past two days is gone, leaving him numb instead. The waves slap at him, and his arms and legs move slower, until he flips onto his back and floats again.

He called Emmy, before she could get the official letter from the State Department, though he didn’t have any idea what to say.

“ _Emmy, it’s Steve.”_

_“Steve! Oh my god, how are you? Are you okay? Is—”_

_“Emmy, I—I have… I have bad news…”_

And she’d gone suddenly silent. Everyone knows what bad news means, in this context. It hadn’t made it any easier to tell her. It was so hard to tell her Becky was dead, because Steve didn’t want to believe it himself.

“ _We—we couldn’t find a body… I’m sorry, we looked, we sent search teams, but—the snow—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Emmy.”_

 _“It’s not your fault_ ,” she’d said, when she finally managed to say anything. Her voice was choked and twisted with tears. _“Of course it’s not your fault, Steve. You did what you could._ ”

But it’s not true. He should have done more.

The sun has definitely moved, now, and he’s cold—so cold, and he knows that if it wasn’t for his enhanced body, he’d already be dead of hypothermia. He treads water and floats, treads water and floats, and the vast emptiness of the ocean creeps into him and fills him out, until he’s nothing but a shell of a man, tossed back and forth by the endless waves.

There’s no real reason for him to keep going; he’s ceased to care whether they find him or not. It’s only that Peggy wanted him to try, to stay alive, and he doesn’t want to disappoint her. If he goes under now, at least he’ll have tried.

It’s awhile before he realizes that the weird roar in his ears isn’t just the ocean, that the noise is coming from somewhere above. He squints, raising a tired hand to shade his eyes, and sees the helicopter, flying low enough to beat the waves into white caps. He waves at it, and it turns toward him, then hovers.

A ladder tumbles down, nearly hitting him. Steve grabs the lowest rung but finds he can’t quite pull himself onto it. His arms and hands are shaking, and his muscles feel like they’ve had all the strength wrung out of them, like they used to when he got pneumonia. He hangs onto the ladder, fingers clenched around the rung, until someone puts a hand on his shoulder.

He looks up, into Peggy’s worried face.

“Peg,” he croaks.

“Steve.” She drops into the water, holding onto the ladder herself. “Are you okay?”

“I tried.” It feels important to tell her that, though he can’t remember why. “I tried.”

Her voice goes soft. “I know you did, Steve. You did great. I’m proud of you.”

 

They get him into some kind of sling to get him on board the helicopter, and then Peggy’s stripping him out of his wet uniform, and wrapping him in blankets. He can’t seem to make his arms and legs work; everything hurts, including breathing, and his muscles are cramped and he can’t seem to stop shivering.

Peggy wraps him in blankets and says soft things to him and raps out sharp orders to the pilot, and Steve closes his eyes and lets everything drift away for a bit.

 

When he wakes up for real, he’s in a hospital bed; he’s got an IV in his arm, his mouth tastes like death, and Peggy’s sitting next to him, wearing scrub pants, flip flops, and a Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirt that’s several sizes too big for her.

It takes several tries before he can get his throat to work. “Hey,” he croaks. “What’s with the outfit?”

Her head jerks up from the book she was reading, relief washing over her face like a wave. “Really? You wake up and the first thing you do is criticize my clothes?”

Steve offers her a weak smile. “Well, they _are_ pretty terrible,” he says, and starts coughing.

“Oh my god, you utter arsehole,” says Peggy, but she grabs a cup of water and helps him sit up enough to drink it, and then helps him lie back down. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I just got hit by a tank,” he says. “Well, more like a HumVee. That happened once, you know.”

Peggy rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I know, I was there. You scared the life out of me.”

He’s not sure whether she means then or now—possibly both, but he owes her an apology either way.

“Pegs… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

She sighs, and runs a hand through her hair. There are dark circles under her eyes, and a pallor to her skin that he’s pretty sure isn’t healthy. “It’s… fuck, Steve, I want to say it’s okay, but it’s not. Don’t ever do that again, okay?”

He closes his eyes, guilt welling up in his throat like poison. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and then, “I didn’t mean to get—I wasn’t trying to kill myself, Pegs.”

“Well, you did a damn good job of acting like it,” she snaps. “I thought you were—God, I thought I was going to lose you, Steve.”

Steve musters up the courage to look at her, and is horrified to see tears in her eyes. “Peggy, God, I didn’t—I—” He grabs her hand, feeling totally inadequate. “I didn’t go in—thinking that. But—Becky—I got up there, and I knew I had to crash, and it didn’t even occur to me that I could—that I could get out. I just kept thinking, maybe… maybe… I’d see her again.” His throat tightens, and he has to look away, blinking fiercely, before he can finish. “I wasn’t thinking,” he says, low. “I hope—I hope you can forgive me.”

“Bloody hell, Steve,” she says, but she sighs and pats his hand. “Of course I forgive you, Steve. But if you do anything like that again, I swear to God I’ll kill you myself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answers, and is encouraged enough by her laugh to say, “So, what _is_ with those clothes, anyway?”

She shakes her head at him, curls bouncing, but allows the change of subject. “I got my uniform wet getting you out of the water. I had to borrow some clothes from the nurses.”

“It suits you.”

She laughs again. “Wanker.”

“Uh huh.” He settles back against the pillows, making a face as the IV tugs against his arm. “So, how long have I been out?”

“Six hours,” she says. “By the way, congratulations on saving the world, and all that. Thanks to you, we still have New York. And apparently London, Paris, Rome, Ottowa, and Washington.”

“Oh, good.”

Peggy leans forward, taking his hand again. Her brown eyes are warm and kind. “I know the past few days have been hellish for you,” she says. “It’s been—pretty bloody awful for me, too. But—it’ll get better, Steve. I promise.”

He nods, not sure he believes her, but comforted by the fact that she’s still there, beside him—a friend, an ally, someone he knows he can depend on, no matter what happens.

Perhaps, for now, that’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: Steve considers going down with the plane, but in the end doesn't.


End file.
